How Sandra Cook is paying it forward for our Scholarship Fund
July–September 2021: Adult Education Center grad Sandra Cook (’71), our very own Avon Lady, is donating 100% of her commissions from her Avon sales to our scholarship fund for students working toward their bachelor’s, master’s, Ph.D., or vocational certifications.
Sandra told us she’s inspired to pay it forward and give struggling students the same kind of opportunity she received when she attended the Adult Education Center’s vocational classes and became one of its 431 graduates five decades ago.
“I hope these donations will give a helping hand, like (center director) Mrs. Geoffray would have done, to students who otherwise wouldn’t have the chance to reach their education goals,” Sandra explained in a phone call from her New Orleans home.
When Sandra attended the Adult Education Center in New Orleans, she was in her early 20s, divorced, and raising two young girls on her own. She had graduated from a segregated high school as a promising college-bound student and had taken some university classes before getting married. But the job market wasn’t very promising for a Black woman.
Then she heard about this education center teaching women the skills they needed to become the first Black secretaries to integrate the multinational corporations and local businesses.
“Thankfully, I was accepted. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I had not gone to the Adult Education Center,” Sandra said.
She laughed over memories of her typing lessons there: “Oh, I really struggled with the typing! I cried many days over that. My fingers just would not move right.”
Sandra remembers one typing class assignment involving formatting letters. She drafted a letter to Oprah Winfrey, then a Miss Black America pageant contestant. Sandra didn’t send the letter then but came across it a few years ago and popped it in the mail. She wanted to share how Alice and the center impacted so many lives!
Sandra graduated from the center in 1971, perfected her typing and accounting skills in an additional program, and landed her first secretarial job in the personnel office at Charity Hospital (now closed because of Hurricane Katrina damage).
“At that time, the NAACP was coming through and trying to see why more Blacks weren’t working in state government,” she said. “I took several application tests and did well, with scores of 95%, 98%, but I wasn’t getting the jobs. When I was finally hired at the state hospital, I was only the second Black person in my office.”
While working full-time for the state, Sandra also went back to school at night to earn her bachelor’s degree.
She worked in several state positions over 30 years, lastly as a Medicaid eligibility worker, before retiring.
She came to be an Avon representative in an unusual way – via Hurricane Katrina. The devastating flooding in 2005 rendered Sandra’s home in New Orleans’ 8th Ward uninhabitable. Her family fled to Washington, D.C., and Maryland, where her in-laws lived.
“I still had a mortgage on the house in New Orleans, and now new expenses in Maryland,” Sandra said. “How was I going to make ends meet?”
Her success with Avon allowed her to create a team and work from an office. Three years after Katrina, she and her family returned to their New Orleans home after gutting and rehabbing it.
Sandra’s fundraiser for The 431 Exchange Scholarship Fund is the ultimate “beauty with a benefit” campaign! Avon will donate a portion from each sale, and Sandra will donate 100% of her commissions.
We are immensely grateful to Sandra for her out-of-the box fundraising thinking and her continued involvement with the Adult Education Center alumni family!
Does your employer offer a corporate matching gift program? Do you have an idea for a fundraiser benefiting The 431 Exchange? We’d love to help you! Get in touch with us at 431Exchange@gmail.com.